Thursday, January 30, 2014

A Breakthrough!

From the Codex Canadensis, Collection of the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa Oklahoma

I just started reading Joseph Boyden'sThe Orenda, a tale of a Jesuit
missionary coming to the wilds of the New World in the 17th C., and his
encounters with the aboriginal peoples there. Sound familiar? It provides a
fascinating alternative view of the world that Louis Nicolas presented in the
Codex Canadensis. Early in the book I came across a passage that gave me the
feeling of all the tumblers falling into place.
(The priest is describing learning the Huron language from a converted
"sauvage".)

"He explained that I had to begin to grasp the natural world around me
if I were ever to conquer the language. The Huron, Luke said, don't live above
the natural world but as a part of it. The key to their language was to make
the connection between man and nature."

Aha! This makes sense to me as I try to understand what made Louis Nicolas
tick. His first work was an Algonquin grammar - which would have been of great
value to the Jesuits as they carried out their mission to bring the word of God
to those they called savage. It seems that he saw himself as something of a man
of science, and whether by accident or design, discovered that he could better
understand the language if he also knew about the plants, animals, fish and
fowl that made up the world in which he found himself. Nicolas made several
expeditions with the various First Nations of the eastern part of North
America, and, judging by the some of the descriptions in his Histoire
Naturelle, he found himself in harsh conditions very similar to ones Boyden
describes in The Orenda. (I previously wrote about a movie, Black
Robe, which offers an account of a Jesuit priest embarking on a similar
expedition, earlier in the 17th century.)

It's all fascinating and somewhat horrifying stuff, and helps to bring Louis
Nicolas to life in my mind. My earlier comparisons of him to Mr. Bean aside, he
would have to be very, very brave to accomplish what he did.

The Codex includes a number of incredible drawings of the First Nations people. I have avoided them completely so far in my embroidery work because they are so fraught with political consequence and I feel I can't really go there, as a white woman of European descent. But they are really worth viewing, and can be seen at the Library and Archives Canada site.

2 comments:

a lightbulb moment indeed, it makes perfect sense that 'the key to a language is in making the connection between man and nature'; I feel sure our surroundings (in)form us in ways we are unaware of as it must do our language, as that is one of the ways in which we communicate with each other.

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About Me

I'm an artist who has been making stuff for 30 years. I used to spin, knit, weave, quilt, design, write, embroider and garden, and I still do most of these things, but for the last few years I have been focused on stitching images from Canada's first natural history, the Codex Canadensis.
I try to live a life of minimal consumption and maximum creation. More and more, I see how these are connected.